Hmmm. I may have just been my own chiropractor.
My back was really hurting and it was driving me crazy. A very bad kind of crazy that happens when you are hounded by chronic pain past the point of endurance and you are dangerously close to doing something – anything – to make the pain go away.
Luckily, all I did when I snapped was go on a rampage of pushing my spine forward as hard as I could in an attempt to force it into the shape of a spine and not the diabolic punctuation mark it’s been assuming lately.
And hot damn, it seems to have worked. My back feels a lot better now. Not out of the woods yet by any means, but the amount of pain while resting has gone way down and I feel a lot closer to being human than before.
So… yay me, I guess.
I will likely push my luck by pushing it more later. See if I can lick this problem, or at least drool on it a little.
Would be ironic after all I have been through, including the failed Catheter Quest 2022 : The Quest for Fru’s Bladder, if I ended up fixing the whole thing myself with something I did in a fit of rage.
That’s fine by me. It can be as ironic as it wants to be as long as it brings me relief. The last five days have been brutal and I would really like to be rid of this goddamned demon before it reaches its one week anniversary on Wednesday.
I’ve still got plenty of the hydromorphone they begrudgingly gave me as I left the emergency room last Saturday. If I hadn’t asked for it, they would have happily had me leave there absolutely no better than when I walked in six hours earlier.
I am coming for you, Doctor Stitt the Illegitimate.
I just haven’t figured out how to describe my complaint medically yet.
Did the IV Antibiotics thang today. Uneventful. They took some blood for what I can only assume are legit medical reasons.
I mean, for all I know, they could want it so they can raise a demon clone of me that I will have to fight near the end of the game.
So frigging cliché.
Oh, and it was a mildly stressful session because for some reason I was really sleepy.
And yet I had gotten plenty of above-average quality sleep the night before. Guess I was not quite caught up yet.
So I spent the whole session in that maddening state I used to get into when I was sleepy in class at school, where I can’t stay awake because I am too damned tired but I can’t fall asleep because then I would miss the class and I have academic FOMO like a son of a bitch.
When I was going to VFS, the one thing that got me out of bed and off to class when all else failed was the thought of the rest of my class going on without me.
I get the feeling that a fear of being left behind was instilled in me at an early age simply by being the youngest of four.
Wait up! My legs are tiny and I am going as fast as I can!
Of course, there’s the fact that they DID actually leave me behind on three separate occasions. But that was not entirely their fault.
I was a very quiet and shy child who had a lot of trouble speaking up for himself and who did not exactly have much situational awareness.
Most children would notice that their family was leaving without them and holler.
Me, it was subjectively like one minute they were there, then poof!
This is what happens when you have, at best, intermittent contact with what laymen know as “reality”.
The world’s not safe for dreamers, that’s for sure.
More after the break.
I remember when the word “ergonomic” first started making the rounds. The received definition was “designed with people in mind”. [1]
And my first thought was, “As opposed to what?? Robots? Aliens? Did I miss the part where everyone got genetically modified to work with machines that were designed without humans in mind at all?”.
Like seriously. How is this a thing?
All it really boils down to is “design that isn’t tragically fucking stupid”.
And that’s not much of a selling point, except perhaps by implication.
“Unlike the other guys….. ”
Way down in the hole
Provided for reference :
This back pain shit is really wearing me down.
I totally should be eating right now. But I can’t.
Because the pain I experienced just getting out of bed has left me nauseous and sore and I couldn’t make myself eat right now with a shotgun and a funnel.
And the really sad thing is that all I really want to do right now is lay back down. Why? Because that’s the only thing that relieve my back pain. Only taking all weight off my back can I get true relief.
The hydromorphone does help. Takes the edge off. But that’s all.
I could take two, but I am trying to make them last seeing as I don’t have a prescription so when they are gone, they are gone, and I am SSOL.
That’s probably stupid. I should just take two every 4-6 hours like it says on the bottle and enjoy a brief but blissful symptom-free period.
But no. I take one every now and then when the pain becomes unbearable and it tones it down just enough to prevent self-defenestration.
Of course, I wouldn’t be going through all this if Doctor Stitt the Hypocrite had managed to remember that despite my urinary saga I was there for my BACK or at least had he honor and integrity to admit he had forgotten instead of showing amazing dexterity by backpedaling while pulling an answer out of his ass.
I should go see Doctor Chao. He’s not perfect but he is not going to kick me out of his office out of panicky embarrassment.
I’ll git you, Doctor Stitt!
And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.